Keeping the auto companies alive was a jobs program, and probably made sense given the state of the economy 8 months ago (especially the dismal perception that people had of the future). The planned bankruptcies wiped a lot of people out and mostly served to keep GM and Chrysler as whole operating units (which mostly protected the people working for the companies, the owners were largely wiped out).
The bank bailouts were probably necessary (or rather, they were probably a good thing, as the status quo is probably better than the years it would take to replace it from nothing), and will likely result in a small profit for the government. Citigroup looks prepared to fall apart all on it's own, AIG is essentially dead (the activity of the parent company is essentially that of selling off assets in order to try and fill in the giant debt whole that it is, it will not fill the whole fully). Bank of America is likely to shrink over the next 15 years (partly because they have a bunch of weak legacy assets from various acquisitions, and partly because the piece don't fit together as well as they thought they would). JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs benefited from the government funds they received (massively...), but it isn't clear to me if they needed the funds, or if the government needed them to take the funds in order to make their other bailouts more successful. In any event, all of those companies face an uncertain regulatory future, and it isn't particularly poisonous that the activity to change banking regulations is proceeding at a measured pace, rather than full speed ahead and damn the consequences.
It isn't particularly good that high level managers have little to worry about as they collect millions of dollars for driving companies into oblivion, but I don't think the future of corporate welfare is as bleak as you paint it.
No doubt. I have A rated no fault insurance (liability only, not collision), and my policy for the current six months is costing me 91% of what my identical policy for the similar period in 2005 cost me.
I guess Michigan might do a better job than whatever state in regulating the insurance industry, but premiums going up 50% in a year is nuts.
In a well functioning capitalist system, there is a fair chance that people would refuse to do business with an insurance company that misled them and then denied them coverage (often, a company that provides the best services at fair prices is the one that is successful, not the one that provides crappy service at poor prices...).
Given that we have all sorts of government regulations in place, there isn't any simple way to decide if greedy business or bad regulation is the problem.
(I find it entertaining that employer-provided health insurance/coverage is quasi-socialist, as the various employees will generally have different insurance costs, but they never see the difference in their pay checks. And then there is the part where they often face incentives to consume care that they don't particularly need (This isn't socialist, but it isn't good for the market))
A big part of it is that the U.S. system doesn't try real hard to optimize the cost-benefit ratio of the overall system (people who can pay get lots of care, with only some regard to their need, people who can't pay only get care when their need becomes desperate), and then there are other issues, the British system benefits from being administered by the same government that enforces their liability (whereas in the American system, liability is a hodgepodge of regulation and enforcement).
The huge amount of spending and the blithe acceptance of the profit motive in American medicine also likely contribute to cost, because they make America an attractive place to do business (drug companies seem to develop a lot of drugs here and then sell them at prices designed to recoup their development costs and make a profit, while happily selling them anywhere else where they can recoup the cost of manufacture).
That paragraph isn't quoted, so it may have been the author of the article that mangled the units (really, if he had the faculty to notice the problem, he should have gone back for clarification, so he is mostly responsible anyway).
out-of-network minutes aren't particularly likely to exist in 3 or 4 years (Boost is currently setting the stage, charging $50 a month for unlimited voice, with no contract).
The economy has very little to do with it. I guess it might be increasing the number of people who are actually confronted with a decision between integrity and money, but being poor doesn't actually change the way someone answers such a challenge.
The reason is that "I can't seem to get MS Office to do that" is a valid excuse to many people that receive documents, whereas "Program-you-never-heard-of doesn't do that" is not.
That's changing as OpenOffice gains more traction, but it hasn't changed enough yet.
Could you throw out two or three sentences on how to passively sniff an unauthenticated https channel, I can't seem to wrap my head around how to do it?
It would be very tiresome for all the people clustered at the mean to deal with a test that was reasonably able to distinguish between folks that are 3 and 4 standard deviations out.
An automatically scaling computer test could probably do it without being a huge pain, but the results of the SAT aren't used in a way that particularly justifies developing such a thing (people scoring over 1500 (or maybe some lower number...) are going to do very well at the great majority of schools, which happens to be the market the SAT is aimed at).
One reason I don't have a Paypal account is that they are not particularly regulated and pull crazy shit all the time, so I can't see how they are dependable, and having an account doesn't seem worth the potential hassle.
To me, the question is about what is more likely: did he use the login information (or perhaps just a pilfered cookie) on some exterior computers without actually breaking a law, or is the FBI report garbled? I would go with the FBI report being garbled, confusing access with receiving the data.
Also, it isn't clear where the EC2 instances were traced from, it could have been from the PACER servers, or it could have been from the 'compromised' library workstations (it sounded to me like the FBI received that information from someone else); again, to me, it sounds like they were traced from the workstations.
(So, to explain further, by garbled, I mean that they wrote "PACER was accessed by computers from outside the library utilizing login information from two libraries participating in the pilot project", when in reality, what happened was "a script running on the PACER workstations at the library was downloading reports from the system and uploading them to Amazon EC2 instances". The second instance could have simply been to simplify the server side of the code, one server for each 'compromised' workstation.)
Slashdot Mirror
So go without. If you are paying it, they aren't going to change a damn thing.
Hole. Not whole. Hole.
Keeping the auto companies alive was a jobs program, and probably made sense given the state of the economy 8 months ago (especially the dismal perception that people had of the future). The planned bankruptcies wiped a lot of people out and mostly served to keep GM and Chrysler as whole operating units (which mostly protected the people working for the companies, the owners were largely wiped out).
The bank bailouts were probably necessary (or rather, they were probably a good thing, as the status quo is probably better than the years it would take to replace it from nothing), and will likely result in a small profit for the government. Citigroup looks prepared to fall apart all on it's own, AIG is essentially dead (the activity of the parent company is essentially that of selling off assets in order to try and fill in the giant debt whole that it is, it will not fill the whole fully). Bank of America is likely to shrink over the next 15 years (partly because they have a bunch of weak legacy assets from various acquisitions, and partly because the piece don't fit together as well as they thought they would). JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs benefited from the government funds they received (massively...), but it isn't clear to me if they needed the funds, or if the government needed them to take the funds in order to make their other bailouts more successful. In any event, all of those companies face an uncertain regulatory future, and it isn't particularly poisonous that the activity to change banking regulations is proceeding at a measured pace, rather than full speed ahead and damn the consequences.
It isn't particularly good that high level managers have little to worry about as they collect millions of dollars for driving companies into oblivion, but I don't think the future of corporate welfare is as bleak as you paint it.
I put my mp3 player down on top of a CD. Nothing happened. Should I smash the CD and feed the pieces into the SD card slot?
No doubt. I have A rated no fault insurance (liability only, not collision), and my policy for the current six months is costing me 91% of what my identical policy for the similar period in 2005 cost me.
I guess Michigan might do a better job than whatever state in regulating the insurance industry, but premiums going up 50% in a year is nuts.
In a well functioning capitalist system, there is a fair chance that people would refuse to do business with an insurance company that misled them and then denied them coverage (often, a company that provides the best services at fair prices is the one that is successful, not the one that provides crappy service at poor prices...).
Given that we have all sorts of government regulations in place, there isn't any simple way to decide if greedy business or bad regulation is the problem.
(I find it entertaining that employer-provided health insurance/coverage is quasi-socialist, as the various employees will generally have different insurance costs, but they never see the difference in their pay checks. And then there is the part where they often face incentives to consume care that they don't particularly need (This isn't socialist, but it isn't good for the market))
Now I'm curious as to how confused you really are.
They can take my short sleeved t-shirts when they tear them from my cold, dead body!
A big part of it is that the U.S. system doesn't try real hard to optimize the cost-benefit ratio of the overall system (people who can pay get lots of care, with only some regard to their need, people who can't pay only get care when their need becomes desperate), and then there are other issues, the British system benefits from being administered by the same government that enforces their liability (whereas in the American system, liability is a hodgepodge of regulation and enforcement).
The huge amount of spending and the blithe acceptance of the profit motive in American medicine also likely contribute to cost, because they make America an attractive place to do business (drug companies seem to develop a lot of drugs here and then sell them at prices designed to recoup their development costs and make a profit, while happily selling them anywhere else where they can recoup the cost of manufacture).
That paragraph isn't quoted, so it may have been the author of the article that mangled the units (really, if he had the faculty to notice the problem, he should have gone back for clarification, so he is mostly responsible anyway).
For non-gamers, they are great; cheap, and excellent driver support (that is, they release working, stable drivers early in the hardware life cycle).
So why ruin your post with the sniping?
(and really, most of the developed world is getting fat an alarming pace, not just the U.S.; speaking as a reformed fatty)
out-of-network minutes aren't particularly likely to exist in 3 or 4 years (Boost is currently setting the stage, charging $50 a month for unlimited voice, with no contract).
The economy has very little to do with it. I guess it might be increasing the number of people who are actually confronted with a decision between integrity and money, but being poor doesn't actually change the way someone answers such a challenge.
The reason is that "I can't seem to get MS Office to do that" is a valid excuse to many people that receive documents, whereas "Program-you-never-heard-of doesn't do that" is not.
That's changing as OpenOffice gains more traction, but it hasn't changed enough yet.
The laws of hilarity demand that the test software requires internet access.
Could you throw out two or three sentences on how to passively sniff an unauthenticated https channel, I can't seem to wrap my head around how to do it?
The #1 reason is that many systems will reject it for being too long...
It would be very tiresome for all the people clustered at the mean to deal with a test that was reasonably able to distinguish between folks that are 3 and 4 standard deviations out.
An automatically scaling computer test could probably do it without being a huge pain, but the results of the SAT aren't used in a way that particularly justifies developing such a thing (people scoring over 1500 (or maybe some lower number...) are going to do very well at the great majority of schools, which happens to be the market the SAT is aimed at).
They are over thar.
Hangovers?
I get along just fine without Paypal.
One reason I don't have a Paypal account is that they are not particularly regulated and pull crazy shit all the time, so I can't see how they are dependable, and having an account doesn't seem worth the potential hassle.
It is nice that we have things down to there only being one of them.
Sony makes overpriced shit. Bad way to argue in favor of Apple.
To me, the question is about what is more likely: did he use the login information (or perhaps just a pilfered cookie) on some exterior computers without actually breaking a law, or is the FBI report garbled? I would go with the FBI report being garbled, confusing access with receiving the data.
Also, it isn't clear where the EC2 instances were traced from, it could have been from the PACER servers, or it could have been from the 'compromised' library workstations (it sounded to me like the FBI received that information from someone else); again, to me, it sounds like they were traced from the workstations.
(So, to explain further, by garbled, I mean that they wrote "PACER was accessed by computers from outside the library utilizing login information from two libraries participating in the pilot project", when in reality, what happened was "a script running on the PACER workstations at the library was downloading reports from the system and uploading them to Amazon EC2 instances". The second instance could have simply been to simplify the server side of the code, one server for each 'compromised' workstation.)